Tragic, ironic, thoughtful, romantic and bloodthirsty, A Bittersweet Life is a dramatic change of direction by writer director Kim Jee-woon, and a demonstration that he’s as good at action and martial arts as he was at horror and comedy in films like A Tale of Two Sisters and The Quiet Family.
Kim’s cool, Alain Delon-esque “hero” is an enforcer called Seon-woo (Lee Byung-hun). And in a cool opening sequence we learn all we need to know about him as he goes at three badass gangsters with a spectacular display of martial arts bravado – here is a man who’s ruthless, efficient, unemotional and loyal to his boss.
Seon-woo is more carapace than character, a machine who does what he’s told. That’s the story here – that shell being subjected to extreme stress-testing to try to reveal the inner man, if there is one there, by seeing what will happen if Seon-woo falls in love, disruptive all-consuming love.
There are two plot drivers. One is already in play from the off – those badass gangsters and the gang behind them seeking revenge for the humiliation Seon-woo has visited upon them. The other might have been lifted from the Vince Vega/Mia section of Pulp Fiction. Seon-woo is instructed by his boss to keep an eye on his much younger girlfriend while he’s out of town. The boss suspects she’s playing away.
After some cat and mousing about between Seon-woo and the very cute Hee-soo (Shin Min-a), the minder does indeed find the boss’s woman in a compromising situation with an age-appropriate lover. But rather than follow his boss’s orders – kill her and him – Seon-woo lets the pair of them go.
Why? Kim has already shown us the precise moment that changes everything, when, in an earlier meeting, as Hee-soo casually pushed a lock of hair over her ear, Seon-woo fell hopelessly in love with her. Suddenly he’s lost – to reason, to his boss, to his own sense of self.
Squid Game is what Lee is probably best known for outside Korea. A Bittersweet Life is the first of a series of collaborations with Kim – The Good, the Bad, the Weird, I Saw the Devil and The Age of Shadows would all follow. His performance here is one of gnat-level micro-metrics and puts him in the same class as all the implacable cool cats of hitman mythology – Keanu Reeves (John Wick), Javier Bardem (No Country for Old Men), Tom Cruise (Collateral), Jean Reno (Leon).
There is a clear debt to Jean-Pierre Melville (not for the last time – Kim’s later Korean resistance movie The Age of Shadows was influenced by Melville’s French resistance movie Army of Shadows). Here Kim is leaning on Melville’s Le Samouraï, where Melville’s cool and clinical hitman played by Delon finds his structured and orderly life challenged by unexpected events. But there is also quite a debt to John Woo’s stylistics – classical music at moments of extreme violence, rain, big coats, men in catalogue-model poses with cigarettes and phones. There’s Tarantino in the rambling idiot-dialogue between halfwit hoodlums. Kubrick in his slo-mo corridor glides.
Cinematic widescreen neo-noir is the result. Striking, desolate locations. Dramatic weather. Lots of shooting in the golden hour, or in the depths of night. Eventually, a couple of big-shootout finales – one a brilliantly choreographed Mexican standoff that’s both funny and tense. The second, proper finale, in a bar called La Dolce Vita (“the sweet life”) where Seon-woo turns out to be one of those movie characters who will not die in spite of being mortally wounded several times. It’s carnage, but poignant carnage.
Throughout, Kim makes sure we realise that violence hurts. People get shot in the finger, the toe, the knee, and they yelp like crazy. But it’s also ironic – the action thriller director undermining the genre even as he demonstrates he’s a master of it.
A Bittersweet Life – Watch it/buy it at Amazon
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© Steve Morrissey 2025
